The FBI campaign of having informants go around social media sites coaxing people into saying enough that the bureau can then have a pretext to arrest them as “terrorists” continues today, with the arrests of a pair of cousins in Aurora, Illinois.
The focus of the arrest was a member of the Army National Guard, Hasan Edmonds, who was friended on Facebook by an FBI informant who got him to say he intended to join ISIS or be martyred trying. He was captured at Chicago Midway airport. The FBI says he planned to fly to Cairo, buy an AK-47, and kill hundreds of people.
That was half of the “plot,” and the other half, though getting less attention, is even more bizarre. Hasan’s cousin, 29-year-old Jonas Edmonds, apparently was put in contact with the same informant.
Jonas couldn’t travel abroad because of an unrelated robbery of a McDonalds, so he instead got involved in a scheme where he and the informant would take Hasan’s uniforms, go to some undisclosed military base in northern Illinois, and do some unspecified terror attack.
The informant talked with the men about buying weapons, and about traveling abroad, and that was enough for them to face a potential 15 years in prison and $250,000 fine.